Guest Blog Post – By Jonathan Lee
Joe ‘Posset’ Murray did it first. He used to post his shopping list finds on Twitter, way before I started. I used to admire them, signifiers of shoppers in a different town or city.
I believe my first post, on Facebook, was an odd one as it had ‘mouldy ham’ written down, discarded in a park while I was on the way to the JobCentre one morning. I didn’t pick it up but took a photo to post once I got back home. After that I kept seeing discarded grocery lists all the time, in trolleys or baskets, at the end of the tills or on the floor.
After picking up a few I noticed that some were indecipherable, others just fragments. This led me to cary on as if I’d discovered some hitherto unknown source of found poetry, scores for readings that had yet to be heard. Handwriting and spelling leant what would be a shopping list in any other hands an air of mystery, especially once I got our eldest child to read out a few.
Still the collection grew bigger and I would get moaned at by the wife for picking up ‘other people’s rubbish’ even though I’d explained my reasons.
I had a vague idea for a ‘zine’ but photos and scans of lists didn’t appeal. Then Covid 19 hit. Long queues at supermarkets with paranoid shoppers (myself included) meant I was only photographing shopping lists in situ as they lay discarded on the floor, instead of picking them up as usual. I was left without a resource.
I was given the chance to perform a gig which gave me and the eldest a chance to read some of the shopping lists in public, plus a couple of found care notes, over some no-input mixer, a kind of low budget power electronics to our peers. We enjoyed it and the idea stuck. I was guided towards older sound poetry by Joe who had written a piece for the TQ zine and this set me on the path to concrete poetry. I downloaded pdfs. I bought a book. I devoured the images and descriptions. A quiet spell at work set my mind towards creating a form of found concrete poetry.
I’m still working on it and developing a CD (or tape) to go with it in zine form. I’m also back to picking up random pieces, making sure I wash my hands thoroughly after photoing and handling them. Daft, I know. I think there’ll be some form of recorded output with our daughter again using some lists, but that’s a separate project now, it’s taken on it’s own identity.
But it’s all Joe’s fault. Thanks Joe.
About the author
Jonathan Lee lives in Darlington, England with his wife, 3 children and an overly needy cat. Aside from collecting discarded shopping lists, Jonathan makes music under the alias Stapperton, collage under the alias insolent.collage and works in a post office. You can find him on social media here (https://instagram.com/insolent.collage) and admire some of his musical output here (https://lurkerbias.bandcamp.com/album/lb-071)
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